Diaspora engagement policies and transnational financialisation in Colombia

Abstract

Although the debate on the migration–remittances–development nexus in Latin America has advanced considerably in recent years, the literature has yet to analyse the socio-political implications of the process of Financialisation of Remittances (FOR) in the region. This paper sheds light on the relationship between the FOR and diaspora engagement policies in Colombia, thus contributing to a growing body of critical analyses on diasporas as agents of development and processes of financialisation beyond the global north. Since the turn of this century, Colombian governments have invested in consolidating part of the state apparatus to capture and maintain the diaspora and their resources connected to the motherland. The paper uses a case study approach centred on a systematic examination of the political–institutional apparatus developed to engage the diaspora and financialise remittances in Colombia over the past 20 years, incorporating a temporal and historical perspective of the triad migration–development–financialisation trends at the national level. It argues that the FOR is a centrepiece of the state's broader strategy for the symbolic and material redefinition of (transnational) membership, in which both, embracing – by extending social and political rights – and tapping – into migrant households’ connections to global circuits of capital and finance – elements co-exist This case is illustrative of how a growing number of states are adopting models of diaspora engagement that, on the one hand, feed into the dominant financialised model of development; and on the other, serve as an instrumental strategy in the emerging architecture of the global governance of migration.

Keywords

Financialisation migration and development diaspora policies transnational citizenship Colombia

Introduction

At the opening of an international housing fair for Colombians in London in 2008, former ambassador to the UK, Noemi Sanín, declared, after singing the national anthem, that “unlike before, now Colombians who leave the country still remain a part of it”. She then added, “Just a few years ago, sending remittances to Colombia was very costly and sometimes they even got lost on the way, now these funds (4,300 million of US dollars per year) are sustaining the Colombian economy…We understand that money being sent to the country is not the leftover income of migrants, it is in fact a big portion of the little money they earn…we are very proud of our fellow Colombians living abroad”¹.

This announcement sheds light on the radical changes in policy towards the Colombian diaspora that have taken place in the past 20 years. In particular, since the turn of this century, successive Colombian governments have invested in developing and consolidating part of the state apparatus to capture and maintain the diaspora connected to the motherland, reconfiguring into what Gamlen (2008, p. 851) has termed an ‘[engaged] emigration state’.

Through the Colombia Nos Une (Colombia Unites Us) diaspora programme, the state's transnational engagement activities have centred on a myriad of diaspora building and integration initiatives – policies to render migrants as subjects of national public policies – including the extension of services and social protections to citizens abroad and symbolic gestures to further migrants’ sense of belonging, connection and loyalty to their families back home and an imagined national community and; programmes for the financialisation of remittances (FOR). The FOR refers to the process by which remittances have become understood through financial logics and the mechanisms deployed for their formalisation, securitisation, channelling and effective management with the goal to strengthen the global financial system (see the introduction to this special issue).

Studying these developments is important for two main reasons. First, although widespread financialisation has meant a growing entanglement of people's everyday lives with global circuits of capital and finance, the burgeoning literature on the topic (Christophers, 2015; Epstein, 2005; Hall, 2012; Langley, 2008; Martin, 2002; Pike and Pollard, 2010) has largely remained geographically focused on the Euro-American experience (Christophers, 2012; French et al., 2012; Mawdsley, 2018). Second, while the ‘financialisation of the periphery’ through the migration–development nexus has become the latest neoliberal management tool to deal with the crisis of global capital accumulation (Bakker, 2015a; Cross, 2015; Hudson, 2008; Pellerin and Mullings, 2013) and diaspora institutions are key to understanding these new developments, they have not figured prominently in the migration literature. With the exception of Zapata (2013, 2018, 2019b), no empirical studies to date have documented the Colombian government's transnational initiatives to incorporate diasporas as key partners in (financialised) development and/or migrants’ level of engagement with them.

This paper unpacks the transnational political–institutional efforts to engage the diaspora and financialise remittances in Colombia and the ways in which these fit into the global governance of the migration apparatus. Thus, it seeks to heed Gamlen’s (2014) call for more research to understand the relationship between diaspora institution formation and financial capital, contributing to a growing body of critical analyses on diasporas as agents of development and processes of financialisation beyond the global north (Bakker, 2015b; Délano and Gamlen, 2014; Pellerin and Mullings, 2013).

The paper argues that the FOR is a centrepiece of the state's broader strategy for the symbolic and material redefinition of (transnational) membership, in which both, embracing – by extending social and political rights – and tapping – into migrant households’ connections to global circuits of capital and finance – elements co-exist The overarching focus of these initiatives on exploiting migrants’ transnational economic ties with their families back home are embedded in International Institutions’ push for harnessing the social and financial resources of diasporas for (financialised) development, in the context of the post-Washington Consensus. Thus, connecting with the diaspora is an instrumental strategy in the emerging architecture of the global governance of migration, whereby the state has been pushed to define a new legal and political conception of membership that promotes a highly institutionalised neoliberal form of state-led transnationalism.

Methodologically, this paper draws on critical readings of the process of financialisation of spatial socioeconomic relations in the global south and uses a case study approach (Noor, 2008; Platt, 2007) to systematically analyse the political–institutional apparatus to engage the diaspora and financialise remittances in Colombia over the past 20 years. The analysis inductive approach centres on an examination of secondary sources such as programmes, policies, laws, decrees and key documents by government, national and global financial institutions, incorporating a temporal and brief historical perspective of the triad migration–development–financialisation trends at the national level.

The paper is divided as follows: the first section critically engages with the literatures on the financialisation of the migration-development agenda and the global diffusion of diaspora engagement policies, with particular emphasis on the role played by International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The second section sets out the importance of the Colombian case by elucidating the dynamics of migration and remittances in the country, while the third section looks at the Colombian government's attempts to cultivate and render migrants as subjects of national public policies and key partners of (financialised) development. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the state is being pushed to redefine its domain of action in an attempt to control and capture the social and financial resources of the population beyond its borders in the context of the post-Washington Consensus.

Governing diasporas: diaspora engagement policies and the FOR

In recent years, critical migration and policy scholars have called attention to the recent transformations in the political economy of the state in the face of the consolidation of the neoliberal development agenda. On the one hand, in contrast to the previously held view in much of the globalisation literature, the state continues to be central in the (re) production of specific discourses and practices and in the (re) configuration of national and global socioeconomic processes (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Waldinger, 2015). On the other hand, the nation-state, still the sole sovereign entity able to grant membership and rights, is being pushed to redefine its territorial domain of action in its attempts to control the population beyond its borders (Bauböck, 2010; Burgess, 2018; Iskander, 2010; Levitt and de la Dehesa, 2003; Waldinger and Fitzgerald, 2004). Since ‘migrants remain home country citizens no matter where they go’ (Waldinger, 2017, p. 8), the state also plays a crucial role in framing the terms under which migrants’ transnational processes and practices² take place.

This political–institutional changing role of the state with regard to its emigrant population, variably termed ‘transnationalism from above’ (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998), ‘state-led transnationalism’ (Margheritis, 2007), ‘diaspora option’ (Pellerin and Mullings, 2013), ‘diaspora strategies’ (Ho et al., 2015), has had profound implications for the (global) governance of migration and the organisation of the state (Délano and Gamlen, 2014), particularly in light of the renewed enthusiasm around the migration–development nexus since the beginning of the 21st century (de Haas, 2012; Escobar (1989); Iskander, 2010; Newland, 2010; Skeldon, 2008; Zapata, 2013.

In their quest to rally the diaspora for the purposes of economic development and/or nation-building (Ho et al., 2015), states are playing an active part in the production of a ‘transnational space’, which is ‘produced by the interplay of the activities of international migrants and the control practices of states intent on disciplining or harnessing those activities’ (Collyer and King, 2015, p. 190). These distant control practices can be direct, symbolic or discursive, and may relate to the state's geopolitical characteristics and the size and distribution of its emigrant population (Collyer and King, 2015). Diaspora strategies may also be the product of context-specific political projects, historic socio-political processes, reliance on migrants’ remittances, state capacity, and external factors such as the influence of regional or international organisations (Boyle and Ho, 2017; Délano, 2011; Délano and Gamlen, 2014; Margheritis, 2007).

In turn, migrants’ individual engagement with state-led transnational activities may be contingent upon their degree of personal and institutional connection to the homeland, their desire and capability to participate in these activities and the socioeconomic and political context in the sending and receiving country (Bloch, 2017); while their collective engagements may be shaped by altruistic and non-altruistic motives and host and home country factors such as migrants’ income, connections to their localities of origin and natural disaster relief (Licuanan et al., 2015).

In light of this, diaspora engagement policies ‘form a constellation of institutional and legislative arrangements and programmes that come into being at different times, for different reasons, and operate across different timescales at different levels within home-states’ (Gamlen, 2006, p. 4). These policies ‘(re)produce citizen-sovereign relationships with expatriates as part of attempts to enhance the state's political and economic maneuverability at various scales’ (p. 21), leading to the transnationalisation of home-state governance. Although this transnationalization may create ‘transborder citizens’³, ‘people who live their lives across the borders of two or more nation-states, participating in the normative regime, legal and institutional system and political practices of these various states’ (Glick Schiller, 2005, p. 27), it is not clear whether these cross-border inclusion initiatives do in fact constitute a sort of ‘transnational citizenship’ – rights-based substantive participation in more than one political community (Fox, 2005). Yet this transnationalisation alludes ‘not only to migrants’ political activities directed towards their countries of origin but also to institutional changes and new conceptions of citizenship in states linked to each other through migration chains’ (Bauböck, 2006, p. 28).

One of the foundations of this transnationalisation has been the extension of external political rights by a growing number of sending and receiving states, especially since the 1990s. For instance, in Latin America, 15 out of 20 states now allow dual citizenship and/or have implemented external voting legislation (Bauböck, 2005; Lafleur, 2015).

While some scholars have argued that states’ transnational engagement is a testament to their instrumental view of diasporas in their pursuit of economic, political or cultural goals (Margheritis, 2007; Smith, 2003; Waterbury, 2010), others have contended that they are the product of complex negotiations between emigrants and a host of state and non-state actors within and outside the state (c.f. Burgess, 2018; Goldring, 2002; Ho, 2011; Iskander, 2010; Lyons and Mandaville, 2012). In either case, diasporas are often constructed through discourses about common belonging to a political transnational community (Bauböck, 2010), as discursive/symbolic extra territorial nation-building projects (Boccagni, 2014; Collyer, 2014). Thus, the effectiveness of diaspora policies is dependent upon the state's ability to create an imagined extraterritorial community through symbolic nation-building policies and developing the institutions to sustain them (Gamlen, 2006).

In short, state boundaries have significantly expanded and shifting state policies towards citizens abroad are reconfiguring the meaning and practices of membership and citizenship, essentially delinking state membership from its territorial dimension (Collyer, 2014). In this sense, as Waldinger (2015, p. 112) has argued, ‘moving to foreign soil gives the emigrants a powerful home soil punch’.

Building on the earlier work of Levitt and de la Dehesa (2003) and others, Gamlen (2008) divided state actions to covet citizens abroad into two broad categories: ‘diaspora building’ – initiatives to formally recognise and nurture the diaspora – and ‘diaspora integration’ – initiatives to extend rights and extract obligations from members of the diaspora. Building initiatives include celebrating national holidays; expanded consular units; commissioning studies or reports; and maintaining ‘diaspora institutions’ – a national diaspora programme, bureaucratic unit or dedicated ministry (Gamlen, 2014). Integration initiatives include allowing dual nationality and citizenship or external voting rights; special legislative representation; welfare and education services support; and promoting diaspora bonds, financial products and facilitating remittances, among others (Gamlen, 2008). In essence, building initiatives relate to states’ embracing of distant members to the polity, while integration initiatives are tightly linked to tapping into the developmental potential of emigrants and their financial and social resources (Gamlen, 2014).

The establishment of formal state institutions to serve the diaspora and their descendants became a global phenomenon with the official linking of the migration issue to the global development agenda at the beginning of this century, with over half of UN member states containing one or more of these institutions by 2014 (Gamlen, 2014). One key element of the promotion of the migration-development nexus throughout the developing world has been the incorporation of migrant populations into mainstream financial systems, to effectively manage remittances and strengthen the global financial system (Global Poverty Action Plan, 2004). These efforts around the FOR have become the latest neoliberal management device to deal with the crisis of global capital accumulation in the context of the post-Washington Consensus (Bakker, 2015a; French et al., 2012; Harvey, 2010; Roy, 2010).

As stated in a recent report by the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), “remittances allow [families] to meet basic needs such as food, clothing and housing, which are essential for lifting people out of poverty. However, the true transformational potential of these funds derives from their investment in education, health and the creation of assets’” [emphasis added] (Fondo de Financiación para Remesas, FIDA, 2019, p. 2). Similarly, the G20's 2017 Financial Inclusion Action Plan, aims to promote financial inclusion as one of the main pillars of the global development agenda (Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI), 2019). In alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), one key element of the Plan is to reduce the global average cost of sending remittances to <3% by 2030, given that they constitute a ‘critical first point of entry into the regulated financial market for conventionally unbanked segments of the population’ (GPFI, 2018). These developments are being turbo charged by the revolution in Financial Technology – Fintech –, the use of software and modern technology for the provision of financial services. Since 2018, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other IFIs are officially promoting the potential of Fintech for deepening financial markets, improving remittance transfer systems and supporting the SDGs, through the Bali Fintech Agenda (World Bank, 2018a). The hype about the potential of remittances as a poverty-reduction and development tool amounts to a local-to-global ‘regime of practices’ that has consequences from the macro- to the micro-level (Kunz, 2011).

These ideas around the key role of remittances and diasporas in this round of financialised development initiatives have been advanced by a range of regional and global institutions such as the European Commission, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the G20, the UN, the World Bank Group, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), microfinance institutions, international NGOs, and Money Transfer Operators (MTOs) (see the introduction to this special issue). They are spread globally by ‘epistemic communities’ (Gamlen, 2014) of ‘migration optimists’ who believe that migration is a win–win–win process for all actors involved – migrants and their families, and their countries of origin and destination, providing the ‘right’ policies are established (Bakker, 2015b; de Haas, 2010; Faist, 2008). They have also been given prominence in the various high level global fora for the promotion and exchange of knowledge on migration and development that have emerged in recent years. These include among others, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Diaspora Engagement Programme, which exults ‘the critical role diasporans play in addressing development challenges’ (USAID, 2017) and the UK Department of International Development Common Ground Initiative, a £20 million fund supporting development in Africa through grants for diaspora organisations⁴. More recently, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and Migration Policy Institute (MPI) published a guide for ‘Engaging Diasporas in Development’ aimed at policymakers and practitioners ‘to help governments make the most of it’ (Agunias and Newland, 2012).

In synthesis, efforts towards the transnational financialisation of migrants and their families have been progressively meshed with the global development and poverty agendas. This strategy has been anchored around three main themes: (a) the increasing celebration of the centrality of financial markets for global poverty alleviation and development; (b) the alignment with the 2030 Agenda, where remittances and financial inclusion are front and centre to achieving sustainable development; and (c) the progressive incorporation of FinTech into the remittances market.

Against this background, a governance perspective is necessary to understand the diffusion of diaspora policies worldwide, since they elucidate profound social and political transformations. In particular, they are part of novel normative mechanisms for a market-based approach to the decentralised governance of global migration and relate to new practices of sovereignty and citizenship at the national and transnational levels. The form and content of these policies are shaped by ideal models and best practices espoused by international organisations ‘becoming both normal empirically and also normative’ (Gamlen, 2014, p. S201). This perspective highlights the assemblage of actors and practices that promote diaspora policymaking and the ways in which these articulate to draw, without the need for coercion, a growing number of states to reach beyond their borders for the transnational members of their polities.

In this scenario, several scholars have argued that, on the one hand, migrant-sending states have given way to pressure from international institutions to incorporate migrants into the polity through ‘preferred’ policy measures in line with the developmental ethos of the Post-Washington Consensus (Bakker, 2015b; Pellerin and Mullings, 2013). On the other hand, diaspora-development policies tend to narrowly conceive migrants’ behaviour, especially in relation to remittances, as derived from rational choices in response to diverse stimuli and motivations, ignoring their wider social world and embodied knowledge (Page and Mercer, 2012). In this vein, Boyle and Ho (2017) have suggested that these policies are part and parcel of the changing ways in which the West attempts to govern from afar through ‘biopolitical projects which remotely discipline, normalize and align conduct’ (p. 580), seeking to ‘(re)produce Western political and economic subjectivities in the global South’ (p. 590). However, given their proclivity to privilege easily quantifiable measures of development, many (human) development-inducing transnational household practices may be disregarded because they do not follow the state's prescriptive mechanisms, in turn, rendering visible the limits and vagaries of the process of neoliberal financialisation (Zapata, 2013, 2019a,b).

As critical policy scholars have pointed out, in the current process of globalisation and transnationalisation of neoliberal policy norms and practices, policies disseminated by ‘travelling technocrats’ are not simply travelling intact from place to place but are instead ‘mutating’, being reconstituted in the process (Larner and Laurie, 2010; Peck, 2011). As Iskander (2010, p. 307) reminds us, the long-lasting Moroccan and Mexican experiences with migration–development policies demonstrate that ‘the specific contexts, experiences and meanings that migrants and state bureaucrats interpreted in their exchanges’ are key to nurturing the processes that may give rise to successful initiatives.

In Latin America, the World Bank and other IFIs have historically exerted considerable influence in the region's social, economic and political agendas, particularly through the articulation of a set of disciplinary practices that legitimise the favoured development interventions (Escobar, 1989). In the context of the Post-Washington Consensus, emphasis has been put on promoting ‘good governance’ (Pellerin and Mullings, 2013), and disseminating ‘favored models of development and socio-technical fixes, like micro credit programs, arrangements to regularize property ownership in informal settlements and conditional cash transfer schemes’ (Peck and Theodore, 2010, p. 171). In a similar fashion to the World Bank's African Diaspora Programme (2005), the IDB's Multilateral Investment Fund established an action plan for the development of instruments to channel, leverage and securitise/financialise remittances and diaspora resources in Latin America. By 2009, the bank had financed 45 loan and technical cooperation agreements (15 countries and 12 regional projects) to promote the developmental potential of remittances to the tune of US$72 million, including a regional project for ‘Promoting Diaspora and Local Support for Productive Initiatives’ (Hall, 2010; IDB, 2008).

The Colombian state ranks high on the list of countries that have invested in developing and consolidating part of the state apparatus to capture and maintain the diaspora connected to the motherland, reconfiguring into what Gamlen (2008, p. 851) has termed an ‘[engaged] emigration state’. As will be shown in the next section, this engagement is being sought through diaspora building and integration initiatives – under the umbrella of the Colombia Nos Une programme – and programmes for the FOR.

Thus, it is argued that the FOR is a centrepiece of the state's broader strategy for the symbolic and material redefinition of (transnational) membership, in which both, embracing – by extending social and political rights – and tapping – into migrant households’ connections to global circuits of capital and finance – elements co-exist The overarching focus of these initiatives on exploiting migrants’ transnational economic ties with their families back home are embedded in International Institutions’ push for harnessing the social and financial resources of diasporas for (financialised) development, in the context of the post-Washington Consensus. Thus, connecting with the diaspora is an instrumental strategy in the emerging architecture of the global governance of migration, whereby the state has been pushed to define a new legal and political conception of membership that promotes a highly institutionalised neoliberal form of state-led transnationalism. Furthermore, this case is illustrative of how, as in many other policy areas, a growing number of states are being drawn – by international organisations and financial institutions – into adopting models of diaspora engagement that, on the one hand, feed into the dominant financialised model of development, particularly through the promotion of the financialisation of transnational migrant households and their remittances; and on the other, aid in the disciplining and management of global migration.

Migration and remittances in Colombia: brief panorama

Unlike many Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil, Colombia did not historically consolidate as an attractive country of immigration but has been one of the region's main sending countries, consistently registering negative rates of net migration (DANE, 2007). While the last census counted 3,378,345 Colombians living abroad in 2005 (DANE, 2005), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated that 4,7 million people (around 10% of the country's population) resided abroad in 2012 (MRE, 2016). Although Colombians began to emigrate in significant numbers in the 1960s as a result of the socio-political instability caused by the country's incipient internal conflict, an unprecedented wave of emigration took place beginning in the 1990s, when Colombians not only began searching for new destinations⁵ – Ecuador, Canada, the United Kingdom, Panama, Costa Rica – but also became more heterogeneous in terms of their social composition and regions of origin (Zapata, 2019a).

Remittances to Colombia have grown in tandem with migration flows: the country ranks as the first remittance recipient in South America and the fifth recipient in LAC⁶, and has been leading the way in terms of remittances growth (CEPAL, 2019). The official amount of remittances sent to Colombia increased from USD$4.8 billion in 2008 to an all-time high of USD$6.3 billion in 2018 (Banco de la República, 2019). Despite their considerable size, they have consistently represented ∼3% of Colombia's GDP (MIF-IDB, 2015). In 2018, the main sources of remittances to Colombia were, in order of importance: The United States, Spain, Chile, Panama, Ecuador and the UK (Banco de la República, 2019).

Up until 2013, the remittance business was primarily in the hands of Commercial Finance Companies (Compañias de Financiamento – CFs),⁷ which controlled 51% of the market, and banks with 37% of market share. Other MTOs such as Sociedades de Intermediación Cambiaria y de Servicios Financieros Especiales (SICSFE) and stock exchange brokers controlled 7% and 9%, respectively. Most remittances were paid over the counter (76% of total) rather than by direct bank deposit (24% of total) (SFC, 2014).

In the face of growing competition to capture a greater portion of the remittances market, banks have made remarkable gains in recent years: in 2016, they captured 66% of the market and conducted a little over 50% of all transactions – totalling 14.8 million – while CFs lost considerable ground, retaining only 28% of market share. However, even remittance recipients who receive their money via banks often prefer to be paid in cash rather than via direct bank deposit⁸ (SFC, 2017, p. 162). Thus, maintaining remittances channelled through banks and other financial institutions in the formal financial system, with the aim to facilitate recipients’ access to other financial products and services and ‘promote a culture of savings’, continues to be portrayed as one of the main challenges facing the financial inclusion of migrant families (SFC, 2014, 2017). It is in this context that financial institutions, in partnership with the state, have centred their efforts on creating channels for the financialisation of remittances and the transnational socioeconomic activities that derive from them. The next section unpacks how these efforts intertwine with the state's initiatives to render transnational migrant households as subjects of national public policies and key partners in (financialised) development.

Diaspora engagement policies in Colombia

The state's transnational initiatives can be broadly divided into two main categories, embracing and tapping the diaspora through building and integration initiatives and, programmes for the FOR⁹.

Embracing and tapping the diaspora: building and integration initiatives

These initiatives may be described as policies that aim to render migrants as subjects of national public policies, including formally recognising and nurturing the diaspora, extending social and political rights and, offering services and social protections to citizens abroad. It also includes symbolic gestures to further migrants’ sense of belonging, connection and loyalty to their families back home and an imagined national community.

Although Colombians abroad have formally enjoyed the right to vote in presidential elections since 1958, since the enacting of the 1991 Constitution, they have acquired normative citizenship rights such as dual nationality, and other substantive rights such as voting in congressional elections, special representation in the lower house of the Congress (one reserved seat) and the right of being elected to the Congress¹⁰ (Escobar, 2007; Guarnizo et al., 1999). The diaspora's prerogative to exercise their political rights has more recently been enshrined in other legal norms such as Law 1465 of 2011, which contemplated the ‘participation of the Colombian diaspora in the country's destiny and the exercise of the rights of active and passive suffrage on equal terms with other Colombians’.

Based on the recognition of migrants as a significant economic and political force, the Colombian government engaged in a vibrant campaign to redefine its relationship with its diaspora. In 2003, it created Colombia Nos Une – Colombia Unites Us – a diaspora programme under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs¹¹, with the overarching aim to ‘permanently link the Colombian state with its communities living abroad’, ‘recognize them as a vital part of the nation’, ‘strive for the creation of a comprehensive migration policy’ and ‘to advocate for mechanisms to facilitate the sending of remittances and to channel them towards savings and investment’ (MRE, 2004).

The programme has two lines of work: the Support Plan for Colombians Abroad (PACE) and supporting the reincorporation of return migrants. PACE is implemented through ‘community meetings’, spaces for dialogue to strengthen the institutional links with the Colombian community abroad, build trust in the Colombian state, foster diasporic identity up to the third generation and offer health, education, housing, pension, savings and entrepreneurship services (Congreso de la República, 2019). Aid to return migrants centres on providing support for rebuilding their life project, as established by the Ley Retorno (Law 1565/2012). In 2003, the government also created the National Intersectorial Commission on Migration (CNIM) – Decree 1239 –, a body bringing together ministries and other government institutions for coordinating the execution of the country's migration policy (Cancillería de Colombia, 2019, 2020).

The extension of national services and social protection schemes to Colombians abroad include access to Colombian health and retirement plans, education, housing and banking. The offering of these services has taken place at different moments in the past 15 years. In terms of access to health and retirement plans, Colombians residing abroad may join the comprehensive protection scheme established within the General Social Security System (Law 100/1993), by contributing from abroad to the General Pension System, for eventual access to medical attention and a retirement pension in Colombia.

This area of work also includes the direct provision of health services to the diaspora in the consulates. Since 2007, Colombia joined the Binational Health Week project of the Health Initiative of the Americas (HIA), a UC Berkeley programme involving Latin American governments, academia, the private sector, and community-based organisations for the provision of health-related services to the Latino community in the US. This initiative is a particular example of the growing convergence of diaspora engagement practices resulting from cooperation between sending governments in Latin America, based on ideas of regional solidarity and unity (Délano, 2014). Since then, around 120,000 Colombians have benefited from the project in the US, Canada, Europe and Latin America. In 2019, these health fairs were scheduled to take place in 20 consulates in 13 countries (Cancillería de Colombia, 2019).

More recently, the state has extended to citizens abroad access to the Ley de Victimas (Law 1448 of 2011), which establishes the conditions for victims of the country's internal armed conflict to receive comprehensive care, assistance and reparation.

Services related to education include information on scholarships and educational loans through the Colombian Institute for Educational Credit and Technical Studies Abroad (ICETEX), technical and language training through the National Learning Service (SENA), recognition of educational qualifications and access to discounts for undergraduate and postgraduate university courses for Colombians residing abroad or returned migrants and their nuclear family in Colombia. For instance, ICETEX, extends credit to Colombian migrants for advanced training (specialization, masters and doctorates) up to USs$16,000. Loan payments can then be made from abroad via bank transfer (Cancillería de Colombia, 2019).

The state has also rolled out other embracing mechanisms by recognising and cultivating the diaspora through symbolic gestures to further migrants’ sense of belonging and connection to their families back home and an imagined national community, expanding consular services and commissioning studies. On the one hand, Colombia Nos Une promotes the ‘Outstanding Colombians Abroad’ project, a tool to foster links with prominent Colombians abroad to create social capital and aid the country's development; and ‘100 Colombians’ an award that honours emigrants excelling professionally abroad (Cancillería de Colombia, 2019). The state has also worked on identifying and engaging key individuals and organisations considered key for development, by supporting a number of mixed (government/private sector/NGOs) initiatives and scientific, technical and business networks and associations through Colombia Nos Une. For example, ‘RedCaldas’, ‘RedesColombia’, a knowledge, trade, cultural and community networking platform supported by IOM, Conexión Colombia’ and ‘Colombianos en el exterior’, whose whose mission is to improve and sustain the transnational links between Colombians abroad and their communities back home and to channel resources towards development projects. On the other hand, the state has commissioned a series of studies to characterise the country's migration phenomenon and know the diaspora (Ciurlo, 2015), and has expanded consular service through ‘mobile consulates’ – a strategy for reaching out to citizens who do not reside in the capitals where the consulates are usually located.

Programmes for the FOR

On the back of the diaspora building and integration initiatives, the government has also aggressively promoted programmes for the FOR, especially in the housing sector. Specifically, the Colombian government has gone a step further than many other sending states in producing ‘transnational space’ (Collyer and King, 2015), putting its weight behind the institutionalisation of migrants’ transnational housing investments. Within the remit of Colombia Nos Une, the government established a series of public–private partnerships with real estate companies and financial institutions to allow migrants to acquire mortgage-financed housing in Colombia through a variety of remittances-for-housing programmes such as Mi Casa con Remesas, the international housing/property fairs, the Fondo Nacional del Ahorro or directly though some commercial banks. As Ho et al. (2015) have argued, these wider institutional and organisational actors and interests that partake in diaspora strategising may be a key element for understanding the wider power dynamics involved in state-led diaspora strategies.

The Mi Casa con Remesas (2007–2010) was a one of five remittances-for-housing projects designed and financed by the MIF-IDB based on the use of remittances for mortgage-backed housing acquisition. The programme was part of a cluster of projects that sought to mobilise remittances to strengthen the global financial system, based on the recommendations that emerged from the G8 summit in 2004. The MIF financed five remittances-for-housing projects throughout Latin America: one in Colombia, two in Mexico (in alliance with Sociedad Hipotecaria Federal and Hipotecaria Su Casita S.A.), one in El Salvador (in alliance with Banco Agrícola) and one in Ecuador (in alliance with Mutualista Pichincha S.A.) (Hall, 2010).

The international housing/property fairs began in 2005 as part of the government's efforts to channel remittances away from consumption towards ‘productive investment’, particularly mortgage-financed housing. The fairs created a new transnational socioeconomic space where property developers and financial institutions could offer their products directly to Colombian migrants in their main cities of destination such as New York, Miami, Orlando, Madrid, London and Santiago (Chile). They continue to take place annually. In 2019, the national builders’ association Colombian Chamber of Construction [Camara Colombiana de la Construcción] (CAMACOL) housing fair ‘Where to live and invest in Colombia’ was scheduled to take place in Chicago, Madrid, Mexico, Santiago, New York and Miami.¹² As can be seen in Figure 1, the promotional material of these remittances-for-housing programmes usually makes use of the Colombian flag, while alluding to their potential for guaranteeing a secure future in the country and migrants’ loyalty to their left-behind families and their motherland¹³. Although the Colombian Government pioneered these fairs, an example of the sort of ‘creative state’ engagement policies documented by Iskander (2010), they are quickly becoming the instrument of choice for many Latin American governments to extend the national housing/financial markets to their citizens abroad¹⁴.

Figure 1.

Promotional material of Mi Casa con Remesas (top) and the international housing fairs (bottom).

The embrace of these particular remittances-for-housing programmes by different Latin American governments may be taken as indicative of the key role of international norms in this area, what kind of development is being privileged, what type of development-inducing policies and ‘best practices’ are promoted and where and how they travel (Délano and Gamlen, 2014).

Under this line of work, the National Savings Fund (Fondo Nacional del Ahorro – FNA), an industrial and commercial state company attached to the Ministry of Housing responsible for facilitating Colombians’ access to homeownership, created the programme for Colombians Abroad in 2011. Colombian migrants can now become members of the FNA to access a voluntary savings account (Ahorro Voluntario Contractual – AVC), which gives them the right to apply for mortgage credit from their country of residence. The programme is open to migrants residing in 57 countries, regardless of their legal status, who can make a monthly deposit (or a mortgage payment once credit has been obtained) through a representative in Colombia, online transfer from a Colombian savings account or through the sending of a remittance via Western Union (FNA, 2019). Also, in recent years, some commercial banks such as Bancolombia – the country's largest commercial bank, Davivienda and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) began extending mortgage credit to Colombians abroad. They tend to apply the same rates, terms and conditions available to Colombians residing in the country.¹⁵

For instance, Bancolombia's ‘mortgage credit for buying housing from abroad’ can be obtained directly by migrants and their immediate family members living in 20 countries including the USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Chile, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. For Colombians residing in other countries, mortgage credit may be extended to a relative living in Colombia for whom 40% of remittances received in the previous 3 months are counted as part of their income in the credit evaluation (Bancolombia, 2019; Jaramillo, 2016).

Another element of this strategy was allowing migrants to maintain a savings account in Colombia. This was made possible by a change in the legislation in 2011 (DCIN-83) – pushed by Bancolombia in 2007 in the framework of the Mi Casa con Remesas Programme – of which it was an exclusive partner. Notably, the new legislation allowed Colombians abroad to open simplified savings accounts (Cuentas de Ahorro de Tramite Simplificado, CATS). Funds can be deposited in these accounts for paying bills or mortgage credit acquired with a Colombian financial institution¹⁶. For example, by 2015, Bancolombia had opened savings accounts for more than 98,000 Colombians residing abroad and had granted more than 9000 housing loans to these clients (Jaramillo, 2016).

Although there had been talks at different government levels about consolidating the state's stance on its citizens abroad since the adoption of the new constitution in 1991, the Integral Migration Policy (PIM) – anchored on the migration–-development nexus – was only approved in August 2009 (CONPES document 3603). Although there is no national or consular consultative body, a coordinating mechanism was created in 2011, the National Migration System (SNM), with the aim of supporting the government in the design, application, monitoring and evaluation of migration policy (Law 1465). However, these policies’ ambitious plans have only been partially implemented, primarily due to institutional and legal gaps, lack of funding and political will (Ciurlo, 2015).

The official rendering of Colombian migrants as subjects of national public policies, and particularly the state's explicit efforts towards the FOR, were spelled out with the incorporation of the migration issue into the Santos’ government 2010–2014 National Development Plan (PND), ‘Prosperity for All’. This plan established that the government would engage in ‘initiatives that promote the characterisation of the migrant population, the management of labour migration flows and the expansion of social services for migrants’. The government also recognised that remittances were essential to the Colombian economy and so, it pledged to make it easier for Colombians to send money through the formal financial system, to reduce remittances transaction costs and to promote their ‘adequate’ use (DNP, 2010).

In line with these goals, the plan included a section on ‘financial education’ for migrant households, which aimed to ‘facilitate and widen access to financial services such as savings, investment, credit and insurance to recipients and senders of remittances’ and ‘facilitate the financial inclusion of emigrants in their country of residence’ (DNP, 2010).

These objectives are in line with the premise espoused by migration-development enthusiasts at the IDB that a significant portion of the money sent by migrants is bypassing the formal banking system and being ‘wasted’ in consumption. Hence, these flows should be ‘considered as financial flows in search of financial products’ and have to be controlled to strengthen the global financial system and to meet the challenge of ‘financial democracy’ (BID, 2006, p. 9).

Santos’ 2014–2018 PND ‘All for a New Country’ also included migrants as subjects of public policy by stipulating, in its article 4, that the transversal strategies developed for the consolidation of the plan's three pillars – peace, equity and education – would apply to Colombians residing abroad (Congreso de la República, 2015).

For its part, the current government of Iván Duque, recognises Colombians who left the country as important for strengthening the country's foreign relations and as key contributors to the country's economic, social and cultural development. Duque's 2018–2022 PND calls for the development of a new integral migration policy and established the strengthening of efforts for the inclusion and support of Colombians abroad as one of its strategic lines of action. Among the plan's strategies is the creation of the programme ‘Siempre Colombianos’ (Always Colombians), with the aim to expand and improve the institutional offer of goods and services to the diaspora.

Since 2012, the promotion of these embracing and tapping initiatives – health, education, pension, housing and financial services – is done through the Ferias de Servicios para Colombianos en el Exterior [Services Fairs for Colombians Abroad], organised by Colombia Nos Une and the consulates and embassies. These are spaces where Colombian public and private institutions, as well as local organisations, offer products and services for migrants and their families in Colombia. Often the president participates in these events. As with the property fairs, these involve a massive logistical and financial investment on the part of government and the participant institutions. Up until August 2019, 33 fairs had taken place in places such as Panama, Miami, New York City, Montreal, Mexico, Quito, Santiago, Argentina, Madrid and London (Cancillería de Colombia, 2019). The last of these fairs took place in Santiago in August 2019. Nearly 7000 Colombians attended this fourth version of the fair in the country, to access services and information from 53 Colombian and Chilean entities, among others, CAMACOL, which participated with nine construction companies and 100 housing projects on offer¹⁷. Colombia Nos Une is now working on new projects and strategies for the ‘inclusion’ of the diaspora in 2020, aiming to increase the institutional offer and the co-participation of Colombian entrepreneurs (Cancillería de Colombia, 2019).

In synthesis, exploiting migrants’ transnational economic links and particularly the FOR have been at the centre of the Colombian state's diaspora engagement policies. These efforts seem to be part of a broader strategy for the symbolic and material redefinition of (transnational) state membership, in which both, embracing – by extending social and political rights – and tapping – into migrant households’ connections to global circuits of capital and finance – elements of co-exist These actions are embedded in the International Institutions’ push for harnessing the social and financial resources of diasporas for development, in the context of the post-Washington Consensus. Thus, a new legal and political conception of membership, promoting a highly institutionalised neoliberal form of state-led transnationalism seems to be emerging.

These developments highlight the crucial role that the nation-state continues to play in framing the terms under which transnational practices take place and the ways in which it is being pushed to redefine its domain of action in an attempt to control and capture the resources of the population beyond its borders. This case is illustrative of how a growing number of states are adopting models of diaspora engagement that, on the one hand, feed into the dominant financialised model of development; and on the other, serve as an instrumental strategy in the emerging architecture of the global governance of migration.

The key role of housing in financialised development

As shown above, given that the housing sector has been at the forefront of the FOR in Colombia – and this in turn, is part of a bigger development agenda – these transnational efforts have been complemented with substantial policy changes at the national level. Subsequent administrations have aggressively promoted the financialisation of the sector as an efficient tool for employment generation and economic growth.¹⁸ These actions are in line with the ethos of the World Bank's Capital Housing Subsidy Model embraced by the Colombian government in the late 1990s. This model placed an emphasis on ‘repositioning housing away from consumption into an investment item and driver of economic growth and the financial sector as the main medium for households’ access to public and private housing and other basic services’ (Zapata, 2018, p. 354).

In line with this, the government introduced a no-strings attached set of incentives for persons wishing to invest in new mortgage-financed urban housing by subsidising the interest rates of new loans. Colombians residing abroad are being forcefully targeted by banks to take up these incentives, subject to compliance with other programme and financing requirements (Bancolombia, 2019). These subsidies, known as Reserve Fund for Mortgage Portfolio Stabilization (FRECH), are granted by the national government, administered by the central bank and allocated through banks, based on the value of the home.

The first generation – (FRECH) 1 – were introduced in the first half of 2009 during the government of Alvaro Uribe (Decree 1143/2009). To apply for the subsidy, any citizen, regardless of income, had to simply inform the bank at the time of signing the mortgage agreement. The government then picked up a portion of the debt in question for the first seven years of the loan. The amount of the subsidy varied according to the price of the house, ranging from 5% for social housing units¹⁹ to 3%. There were 32,000 subsidies available under this scheme (Ministerio de Hacienda y Crédito Público, 2009).

The second generation of subsidies – FRECH II – was launched by the Santos administration in 2012 (Decree 1190/2012). These subsidies – of 4% of the mortgage interest – were limited to the purchase of new urban social housing and to families with total income not exceeding 8 SMMLV (legal monthly minimum salaries)²⁰ who were not homeowners (Banco Caja Social, 2019).

In 2013, the Santos government extended these subsidies to the purchase of new properties other than social housing as part of the Plan to Promote Employment and Productivity (PIPE). Under this third-generation round of subsidies – FRECH III – the government would cover 2.5% of the mortgage interest for people who acquired new housing valued between 135 SMMLV and 335 SMMLV, through mortgage credit or a housing leasing contract. These subsidies were available to people regardless of income or who already owned a house in the country. The programme targeted the middle class and aimed to reach 50,000 families (Ministerio de Hacienda y Crédito Público, 2013).

In 2015, the Santos government complemented these set of incentives by giving families with incomes up to 4 SMMLV, a subsidy in the form of money for the down payment of mortgage-financed new urban homes through the “Mi Casa Ya” programme. The subsidies range from around US$7300 (30 SMMLV) for low-income households to US$4800 (20 SMMLV) for households with income between 2 and 4 SMMLV (Minvivienda, 2019). The programme sought to benefit 150,000 families in the first four years of the programme (RadioRed, 2015). In addition to the down payment subsidy, these families could also take advantage of the interest-rate subsidies if they purchase a house worth up to the equivalent of a social housing unit. By August 2019, a little over 38,000 of this type of subsidy had been allocated (Minvivienda, 2019).

Despite all these efforts, Colombians’ access to financial services remains shallow at best: in 2015, the financial depth indicator, the ratio of private sector credit to GDP, stood at 40.5% – compared to 42.5% in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) –; while banking penetration, the percentage of the population aged 15 + with an account at a formal banking institution, was 35.7% – compared to 46.5% in LAC – (World Bank, 2018b)²¹. Furthermore, housing finance remains out of reach for the majority of Colombia's population, who belong to the lower and lower-middle income strata – 80% according to most recent census estimates (Portfolio, 2018).

Thus, as shown above, the recent drive for the FOR in Colombia has materialised as an extension or new phase of the migration-development agenda as a result of the overall ‘partial’ failure of the different housing finance schemes implemented over the past 40 years and of past initiatives to fulfilling the mantra of ‘releasing the investment potential of remittances’ and bringing about (economic) development. The migration-for-development discourse, the sites and practices continue to be replications/reworkings from earlier times and are still anchored on the idea of remittances as a panacea for development, this time through access to and investments in financial products and services.

However, despite all these aggressive efforts, financial sector penetration among transnational migrant households is rather narrow and seems to be limited to having a bank account with little uptake of other more sophisticated financial products and services (SFC, 2017). Thus, financial institutions, continue to invest heavily not only in the financialisation of migrant households and their transnational economic activities but also on their permanence in the financial system (via savings and investments), on the basis of state-sponsored discourses and policies that celebrate the development and poverty-alleviating potential of remittances.

Concluding remarks

Half a century of emigration has transformed Colombia into a ‘transnational social formation’, in which the production, re-production and transformation of the political, cultural and socioeconomic structures of the country interact with, influence and are influenced by residents in multiple foreign territories (migrants) (Guarnizo, 2006). Since the turn of this century, Colombian governments have tried to capitalize on these transnational links by attempting to make migrants an integral part of a reconstituted definition of the Colombian nation. They have done so by developing and consolidating part of the state apparatus to capture and maintain the diaspora and their resources connected to the motherland, reconfiguring into what Gamlen (2008, p. 851) has termed an ‘[engaged] emigration state’.

This engagement is being sought, under the Colombia Nos Une programme, by embracing and tapping the diaspora through building and integration initiatives – policies to render migrants as subjects of national public policies – including the extension of rights, services and social protections to citizens abroad and symbolic gestures to further migrants’ sense of belonging, connection and loyalty to their families back home and an imagined national community, and programmes for the FOR.

Thus, it is argued that the FOR is a centrepiece of the state's broader strategy for the symbolic and material redefinition of (transnational) state membership, in which both, embracing – by extending of social and political rights – and tapping – into migrant households’ connections to global circuits of capital and finance – elements co-exist These actions are embedded in the International Institutions’ push for harnessing the social and financial resources of diasporas for development, in the context of the post-Washington Consensus. Thus, the state has been pushed to define a new legal and political conception of membership that promotes a highly institutionalised neoliberal form of state-led transnationalism.

The Colombia case is illustrative of the ways in which a growing number of states are being drawn – by international organisations and financial institutions – into adopting models of diaspora engagement that, on the one hand, feed into the dominant financialised model of development, particularly through the promotion of the financialisation of transnational migrant households and their remittances; and on the other, serve as an instrumental strategy in the emerging architecture of the global governance of migration.

Despite these aggressive efforts, the results have been mixed: the international housing fair in New York in 2008 raised US$9.7 million, while the one in London that same year was attended by more than 1000 Colombians and registered sales of US$8 million. In 2019, the six fairs organised by CAMACOL attracted more than 21,000 visitors and 31 construction companies (CAMACOL, 2020). In contrast, by early 2010 – near the end of the programme, just 620 houses (totalling around USD$18,000 in mortgage-credit) had been purchased through the Mi Casa con Remesas programme (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 2010). Likewise, by December 2016, only 2087 Colombian emigrants had opened voluntary savings accounts and 216 mortgages had been approved by the FNA (FNA, 2016).

This should not be surprising since previous research suggests that Colombians’ response to this type of state-led transnationalism has been timid. In particular, financial sector penetration in Colombia and among transnational migrant households remains shallow and seems to be limited to having a bank account with little uptake of other more sophisticated financial products and services (Jaramillo, 2016; World Bank, 2018b). Also, as Zapata (2013) has documented, because of government mistrust, Colombian migrants ‘are not embracing their newly-assigned financial subjectivities but are instead using alternative [transnational] channels for housing acquisition and financing’ (p. 101). Similarly, political rights granted to the Colombian diaspora are not always exercised and, on the back of an ‘ambivalent citizenship’ – also partially explained by a deep mistrust in the state – their transnational political engagement remains low, dispersed and fragmented across gender and class (McIlwaine and Bermudez, 2015).

In this sense, one must tread with caution with regards to the glorification of the globalisation of finance for the provision of widespread market access and greater autonomy for socially vulnerable groups, since their integration into global circuits of capital and finance has, by no means, been homogeneous. Rather it may be instead a new form of ‘poverty capital’ (Roy, 2010) that is creating new spaces for the financial exploitation of low-income populations (Dymski, 2007; Kear, 2013).

This enthusiastic embrace of the diaspora not only reproduces a development paradigm that shifts the responsibility from the state to its citizens, at home and abroad and further institutionalises market friendly agendas; but also ignores (most) migrants’ marginal socioeconomic standing in host countries, the global inequalities (re)produced by mobility, as well as current global trends towards the dehumanisation, securitisation and criminalisation of migration flows (Bauman, 2016; Pellerin and Mullings, 2013; Zapata, 2013).

In the face of a growing entanglement of people's everyday lives with global circuits of capital and finance and the mainstream literature's geographical fixation with its manifestations in the Euro-American context, it is clear that the consolidation of a global neoliberal financialised development model is rapidly reshaping North–South economic and socio-spatial relations, especially through remittances. This paper has sought to contribute to address this gap by shedding light on the relationship between the FOR, the migration–development nexus and diaspora engagement policies in Colombia, thus contributing to a growing body of critical analyses on diasporas as agents of development and processes of financialisation beyond the global north.

Further research may investigate migrants’ level of engagement with the growing social, political, economic and cultural diaspora engagement initiatives promoted by the state. In particular, it remains to be seen if these diasporic institutions and policies would eventually produce some form of substantive Colombian ‘transnational citizenship’.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to colleagues from the Institute for Political Studies (IEP) of the University of Lausanne for inviting me to participate in this endeavor. Special thanks to the guest editors of this special issue (Rahel Kunz, Julia Maisenbacher and Lekh Nath Paudel) and the other participants in the Financialisation of Remittances Workshop in Weggis, Switzerland in 2019 (Vincent Guermond, Araby Smyth, Roseline Misati, Yannick Perticone and Brenda Ramirez) for providing valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. The paper also greatly benefited from comments by three anonymous referees. All errors and omissions remain mine.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Gisela P Zapata

Notes

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